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Educating the Open Generation | Panel on Open Data and Data Sharing at the DSL

“Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness.” –The Open Knowledge Foundation

In recognition of International Open Access Week, the Brown University Library invites you to a discussion on Wednesday, October 22 at 4 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab with Jo Guldi and Lizzie Wolkovich about the progress of the movement towards open access to research data and how public access to data and data sharing among scholars, or the lack thereof, is currently affecting the quality and scope of research in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Jo Guldi is the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. Dr. Guldi specializes in the history of capitalism and land use, and she also designs computational tools for visualizing large numbers of texts. She posits that access to increasing amounts of data will allow historians to again extend their temporal perspectives. In her new book, History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dr. Guldi and co-author, David Armitage, identify a recent shift back to longer-term narratives, following many decades of increasing specialization, which they argue is vital for the future of historical scholarship and how it is communicated.

Elizabeth M. Wolkovich is Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Dr. Wolkovich studies how ecological communities assemble and disassemble with global change using statistical and modeling techniques combined with field experiments, gradient studies, and synthesis of short and long-term data. She is the lead author of the article “Advances in Global Change Research Require Open Science by Individual Researchers,” which appeared in Global Change Biology in 2012, and she was recently featured in the Science Careers article “Chasing Down the Data You Need,” in which she shared her efforts, and frustrations, trying to get fellow scientists to share climate and ecological data that could add insights into her and fellow researchers’ interdisciplinary scholarship on global change.